By: Ramez Antoun, PT, DPT – February 15, 2014 So the day started by having both Gray Cook and Dr. Stu McGill give their presentations. It was then followed by each of them doing a demo/screen on a gentleman from the crowd to practically highlight points they made in their presentations. Then time was given for questions and answers followed by concluding statements. Gray Cook started the day off by explaining the “why” behind the FMS. And simply it was a way from him early in his career as a PT and strength coach to set the bar for himself and his colleagues in terms of a movement quality minimum baseline that they tried to meet with every one of their patients/clients, and when they didn’t they would ask themselves why. Their goal here was to first look at and set a baseline for movement patterns first before obsessing over the individual parts. Back in the 90’s there was no means of measuring whole movement pattern quality. We were, and the majority of us still are, analyzing, measuring, and trying to fix parts and expecting the parts to work themselves out to produce a clean whole movement pattern. We have screens for looking at blood pressure, hearing, and vision; and there is a minimum level of competency that you must demonstrate in each of those categories before you are cleared by a health professional, but when it comes to movement we never screen movement quality and we never had a means of looking at a minimum level of movement quality competency until the FMS. Gray explained that the FMS is simply a screen and nothing more than a screen. Many people try to turn the FMS into something it was never intended to be, it was NEVER meant to be an assessment or something that predicts the future. It was a way of looking at 7 basic patterns first and making sure we took pain (score of 0), significant dysfunction (score of 1), or significant asymmetries between right and left sides (1-3, 1-2) off the table first before loads and conditioning entered the picture. It was also never intended to police perfection of movement either, as long as you...